Blu-ray Disc

October 16, 2016

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can't seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015's Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen's nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker's aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen's old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren't the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully-lensed and defiantly dumb, it's another testament to Allen's surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

by Walter Chaw There's a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon: "There was a demon that lived in the air." I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture's title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn's film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with "whoever challenged [the demon] would die...where the air could no longer get out of the way." The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth--the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning--that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there's The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It's astonishing.

by Bryant Frazer Australia's signature entry in the cinematic encyclopedia of dystopian hellscapes will always be the Mad Max series, and rightly so. But if you dig just a little deeper into the corpus of down-and-dirty genre movies from Down Under, you'll discover this B-grade entry from Aussie action impresario Brian Trenchard-Smith, which daydreams about confining rebellious youth culture to a dusty prison camp way out on the edge of town. Trenchard-Smith is best-known abroad for 1983's BMX Bandits, an early Nicole Kidman feature widely available for home viewing in the U.S., and his corpus comes with the Quentin Tarantino seal of approval. Dead-End Drive-In isn't great cinema, but it has some well-executed stuntwork that bolsters a speculative premise just goofy enough to catch the imagination.

by Bryant Frazer One of the most audacious debuts in cinematic history is rookie Shunya Itô's expressionist rape-revenge saga, the Female Prisoner Scorpion trilogy. These three films, released in the 11-month period between August 1972 and July 1973, elevate Japanese studio Toei's series of "pinky violence" sexploitation films with daring, theatrical visuals reminiscent of the bold work that got Seijun Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and a subversive sensibility that could be described as genuinely feminist. Of course, Itô's studio bosses didn't have art in mind. Loosely adapted from a popular manga, the first Scorpion was conceived as a gender-swapped take on Teruo Ishii's popular Abashiri Prison film series, on which Itô had worked as assistant director. Moving the story from a men's prison to a women's prison accommodated sensationalized images of nudity and sexual violence, which even major Japanese studios were relying on in the early 1970s as a way to compete with American imports. But Itô talked his screenwriters into throwing out their derivative original script and starting anew. He also convinced Meiko Kaji, a rising star thanks to her appearances in the popular Stray Cat Rock movies about Japanese youth street culture, to take on the title role. (Kaji arrived at Toei from Nikkatsu after the latter studio diverted its production resources to so-called "roman porno" softcore in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television.) The results are singular. Itô's flamboyant visuals created florid showcases for Kaji's riveting screen presence, especially her oft-deployed 1,000-yard stare--a stone-cold, daggers-to-your-eyeballs glare of the type seen elsewhere in only the most unnerving of horror films. Itô and Kaji turned out to be an electrifying combination.

September 4, 2016

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features--especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain--which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief--wanted to see a "real" purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a "real" prince, or a "real" wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the "real" Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. "Ghoulish curiosity" is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010's Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp's recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we've seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I'm dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney's animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin' April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

August 28, 2016

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It's a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and "Tales from the Darkside", tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable '80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd's idea of a dreamgirl's job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a "Jackal Boy" monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia's cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It's about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer's regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn't writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia's interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to find entry into Malcolm D. Lee's Barbershop: The Next Cut (hereafter Barbershop 3), because the topics it broaches are generally topics I only intersect with philosophically. I hear about the gun violence in Chicago, I see gang violence portrayed in films like Boyz N the Hood and Colors and more recently David Ayer's ugly End of Watch, and I do my best to be empathetic to horror stories about children shot in their beds as crossfire collateral. I see pictures of what Detroit looks like and read what I can about dystopias that make RoboCop's vision of the Motor City seem naive now. I agree entirely with the Black Lives Matter movement. I wonder why it is that even video of atrocity does little to bring rogue officers to justice. I wept when Dallas policemen were ambushed while protecting Black Lives Protestors' right to rage. I felt righteous fury along with the protestors in Ferguson. Charleston, and the graceful response by the church during funerals to mourn their dead, broke me apart. One of my best friends is black; I resist saying that because it's what non-black people say to pardon their racism. I watched both O.J. Simpson miniseries. And I realize I am entirely unsuited to speak to the black experience in the United States. It's not my place. I don't know anything.

by Walter Chaw Shane Black's The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it'd be painted by Robert McGinnis. It's California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen's Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who's often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it's a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they're thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

August 21, 2016

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+starring Maynard Eziashi, Pierce Brosnan, Edward Woodward, Beatie Edneyscreenplay by William Boyd, based on the novel by Joyce Carydirected by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw I'm not sure exactly when or why Aussie director Bruce Beresford became the cinematic spokesman for the African experience. It probably, in Hollywood's peculiar racial calculus, had something to do with his appalling Driving Miss Daisy being the Oscar juggernaut that Do the Right Thing was not. Credit Beresford for the years he spent living in Nigeria and the stands he took in films like The Fringe Dwellers to work with an Aboriginal cast against counsel, but something nettles that, with the remake of "Roots" still warm and Beresford and fellow Aussie new-waver Phillip Noyce at the helm of half of its four episodes, somehow Beresford is the acceptable choice to tell these Black stories. This isn't even an indictment of his pictures, mind, but rather an indictment of a system so heavily skewed towards one racial group and gender that whatever the quality of the product, there's a good conversation to be had about the people making it. There's dissonance.

by Walter Chaw It isn't so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it's that it's hard to assimilate. Once you're drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter's film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can't necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I'm trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

August 14, 2016

by Bryant Frazer The market for 1980s horror nostalgia on Blu-ray reaches some kind of saturation mark with the release of Just Desserts, a feature-length documentary on the making of Creepshow, the George A. Romero-helmed, Stephen King-scripted anthology-film homage to EC horror comics. Producer-director-editor Michael Felsher, well-known to home-theatre horror buffs as perhaps the most prodigious creator of the featurettes that show up on genre releases from independent video labels, originally made Just Desserts for a 2007 UK DVD release of Creepshow. Unfortunately, he couldn't get Warner Home Video interested in picking it up for the North American version. One $4,400 crowdfunding campaign later, Felsher himself engineered the BD release of Just Desserts via Synapse Films in the U.S.. That's a great story in its own way--who doesn't like to see an independent filmmaker bypass the studio gatekeepers and give his work a chance in the market? Divorced from its context as a studio-sponsored bonus feature, however, Just Desserts doesn't stand out in any way except its earnestness. It's an excellent example of the cozy, clips-and-interviews format that dominates Blu-ray supplements, and that means it's essentially rote in both form and content. Felsher isn't mounting a critical argument about Creepshow, nor is he placing it in a revealing new context. He's simply flattering the film and its audience.

by Walter Chaw There's something ineffable about Jean Renoir's same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden's The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It's more real than real ever was, the "real" of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It's not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I've seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments--like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus--where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you're connected to the entire stream of lives you've lived and lives you haven't, or haven't yet. I don't know how The River does it, but it does.

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Think about what sort of film would place Will Ferrell's schlubby physique and vacant grin against Mark Wahlberg's sharp, furrowed brow. More than just comically mismatched, these two actors belong in different movies, different genres...on different planets, even. They share something resembling a love-hate "chemistry," but from the get-go the pairing feels off--different. Eventually you figure out that The Other Guys is the kind of movie that thrives on bizarre contradictions--the kind of movie where gun-toting heroes are sent to end corporate malfeasance, where their vehicles of choice are a Prius and a Gran Torino that runs on "100% vegetable oil," where they loudly defend not the awesomeness of Star Wars but its scientific accuracy.1 A quintessentially American response to the quintessentially British Hot Fuzz, Adam McKay's The Other Guys is the funniest, most delirious comedy I've seen in a long while, and it matches and exceeds the sharp cultural satire of McKay's Talladega Nights in tackling not so much the conventions of the buddy-cop genre as the childish drama that attends them.

by Bryant Frazer At some point during the free-for-all brawl that climaxes The Swinging Cheerleaders, I remember thinking to myself, "This has got to be one of the most American movies ever made." I was reacting in part to the iconography--cheerleaders fighting policeman fighting college footballers, almost in the manner of a silent comedy, as Scott Joplin plays on the soundtrack--but also to the mood of the film, in which converging themes of corruption and cynicism lead to an eruption of chaotic, comic violence, and open-hearted jocks make way for joyous optimism to prevail.

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow's action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score--including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox--and editing and execution. It's that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too--that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves's Everybody's All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze's blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It's a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow's Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the "greed is good"/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.